29 November 2016

Digital Ad Shenanigans: The Academic Edition

Not too long ago:

03 October 2016
Digital Ad Shenanigans
It’s been a bad week or so for online advertising foolishness and chicanery. No big surprise for yours truly. I’ve been yacking about this nonsense for a decade.

Now there’s a book about it:

Black Ops Advertising
Native Ads, Content Marketing and the Covert World of the Digital Sell
by Mara Einstein
… Whatever the label, however, it comes down to this: advertisers can camouflage their sales message in only one of two ways 1) hide the advertising within existing content environments or 2) create the pitch themselves and make it look like something other than advertising. The first of these is native advertising, the second content marketing …

And a review in The New York Times:

… The realization that something you thought to be “real” is actually an advertisement is an increasingly common, if unsettling, sensation. Mara Einstein calls it “content confusion,” and if her book, “Black Ops Advertising,” is right, we’re in for even more such trickery, indeed a possible future where nearly everything becomes hidden commercial propaganda of one form or another. She forecasts the potential of a “world where there is no real content: Everything we experience is some form of sales pitch.”

All true. Although my take is that these silly Next Big Things will come and go.  They’ve been coming and going for years:

07 December 2012
What is Digital Advertising?
[image%255B5%255D.png]… The newest buzz-phrase has me completely baffled: Native Advertising.  One social media guru described it as advertising that is ‘baked into’ the content. I guess it’s sort of like the old Burns & Allen Show where one episode had Gracie baking a cake using Betty Crocker Cake Mix, a sponsor.

And this (again):

[image%255B22%255D.png]

 imageProfessor Mara Einstein has been working in and writing about the media industry for more than 20 years. Her career has taken her from being an executive at NBC and MTV Networks to positions at major advertising agencies, working on such accounts as Miller Lite, Uncle Ben’s, and Dole Foods.

I haven’t read the book, but will.

04 November 2016

Even More Some of The News That’s Fit to Print

walterwinchell_thumbGood evening, Mr. and Mrs. Marketing from continent to continent and satellite to server and all the ships at sea. Let's go to press

Hungry? Senior Nutrition Fellow Ruth Kava sez to Food Purveyors: Ignore Baby-Boomers at Your Peril … “How amazing. How astonishing. How pathetic.” That’d be Dick Stroud wondering about Marketers discovering  the importance of the 50-plus once again and Advertising campaign gone wrong. Oldsmobile alienated the very people who would buy their cars. Photo: 1958 Oldsmobile Super 88 Holiday coupe by Sigmund CC BY-SA 3.0again and againAdvertising campaign gone wrong: The idea of people over fifty driving their cars is so appalling and such an embarrassment that they outright ignored and disparaged the most valuable economic group in the history of the world (or you could’ve read this blog for the last thirteen years) … From the Best 18 minutes you can spend today Dept.: The “Great Volkswagen Ads” Documentary FilmThe No Big Surprise Dept.: Boomers buy about two-thirds of the new cars Image result for Doodyvillesold annually, as well as half the computers and a third of the movie theater tickets … Read all about Doodyville … Meet the 2016 Influencers in Aging (What? I’m not on the list? The process is rigged!) Congrats to Paul Kleyman and Louis Tenenbaum … ‘til next time…


Just for Fun:

Image result for Huffington postMouth Hunters
by Chuck Nyren
I’ve been thinking about buying this house. Then I was told that it might be time to buy a new mouth…